claim-a suit on behalf of the German people-on the three paintings from the Hallstatt cave. They don't see why Bolzano should get them back.'
'Incredible,' I said, the first sensible comment I'd made in a while.
'What's so incredible about it?' Flittner said abruptly. 'The rules of war. How much art would be in the Louvre if Napoleon hadn't raped the rest of Europe? To the victors belong the spoils. What's the difference in this case?'
Gadney rifted his eyes and tossed his head minutely, as if he had borne this sort of thing more times than any human being should have to. But he sat in stoic silence.
'I think there is a difference,' I began, ready to have my first real say, and arranging my thoughts on this venerable issue, but Anne got there before me, and much more pithily.
'They weren't the victors,' she said simply.
'Exactly,' Flittner said, as bitterly as if he'd signed the surrender himself. 'We're the victors, so we make the rules.'
'Well,' Robey said, his Archaic smile shining gently forth, 'let's enjoy it while we can. How often do the good guys get to make the rules?'
That appeared to be a reasonable end to an unpromising avenue, and while Robey went through the pipe smoker's slow voluptuous, lighting-up ritual, the rest of us held our peace.
'Anyway, Chris,' he finally said behind a slowly twisting web of blue smoke, 'this Schliemann group spends its time writing nasty letters to us and to the press-'The Plundered Past is an insult to the German people, nothing but American propaganda'-that kind of thing. They don't get any support, thank God.'
'I have to disagree,' Flittner said. 'There are a lot of people who see this show as nothing more than self- serving propaganda. Which we all know it is, even if we don't have the guts to admit it.'
Robey dug peacefully at his pipe with a gimmicky tool while his mind drifted elsewhere. Anne listened impassively. Gadney rolled up his eyes again and made a put-upon face. I kept waiting for him to say, 'Oh… really!' but he restrained himself. All three, it was clear, had heard Flittner on this subject before. Only Harry was attentive and interested, his forefinger curled in his beard.
Seeking a fresh audience, Flittner swung his long, somber face back and forth from Harry to me as he spoke. 'Even in the Bundestag-a couple of weeks ago Katzenhaven got up and demanded to know how much this show is costing the German government.'
He was not a careful shaver, I noticed; stubble glinted like shards of mica here and there along his jawline. A spattering of ash was on his jacket, and while he spoke he dropped some more from the cigarette in his hand.
'But it isn't costing them anything, Earl,' Anne said. 'You know that'
'I know, of course I know.' Impatiently, he flicked more ash on himself. 'I'm using it as an illustration. The- oh, the hell with it.' He slumped back in his chair.
'Listen, let me say something at this point,' Harry said. We've asked the Polizei to look into this Schliemann gang-'
'They're not a gang' Flittner interrupted. 'They're a political foundation. Jesus Christ.'
'Excuse me, this Schliemann Foundation. Except that they're not a bona-fide foundation. They're not on record, they don't have an address, they don't sign their letters with their real names. For all anybody knows, they could be one old Nazi crank sitting home alone grinding out crackpot letters.' He winced as Flittner reared up to protest, but stuck to his guns. 'Excuse me, Dr. Flittner, but that's the way they look to me. They've got no support, even from the lunatic fringe.'
'Now look here, Major,' Flittner said angrily, 'it seems to me you're being damned free with your-'
'What I think Harry's saying, Earl,' Robey cut in smoothly, 'is that they wouldn't have the expertise to get into the storage room the way those two men did.'
'Right,' Harry said amiably, 'that's all I'm saying. Or the money to buy somebody else's expertise.' He smiled winningly at Flittner, who subsided, detonating another gush of smoke from his facial orifices.
An airman entered with a message. Robey read it and stood up. 'Telephone,' he said. 'Why don't you take over, Harry?'
'You bet, Colonel. Well, I think we better get on to talking about what we do to prevent a repeat of what happened. Now, Captain Romero of my staff is an expert in this stuff, and he's been working with Captain Greene here on a new… what's he call it, Anne?'
'An intrusion-detection system.'
'Right, an intrusion-detection system. Now, these things are pretty complicated, but I want to try to explain, because it means procedures are going to be a little different starting in a few days.'
'Uh, Harry?' Robey had come back as far as the doorway. 'Harry, I think you better sit in on this call. Anne, you can fill them in on the security system, can't you?'
'I'll do my best, sir.' She pulled some notes out of a pocket in her attache case and glanced uncomfortably at me as Harry left with an oddly subdued Robey. 'I'm sure Dr. Norgren will see very quickly that I'm out of my element.'
Terrific, Norgren, I thought; the most attractive female you've met in months, obviously predisposed to be friends, and you've managed in little over an hour, with just a couple of succinct and impeccably chosen sentences, to convince her you're a boorish, arrogant horse's ass.
'Out of mine too,' I said with what I hoped was modest charm. 'I've yet to meet a wiring diagram I could understand.'
It was true enough. Her enthusiastic and apparendy expert description of infrared beams, entry-reporting networks, pressure alarms, and photo-electric barriers quickly left me behind. I could almost feel my eyes glaze over. Gadney participated vigorously, however, and Flittner participated after his fashion.
Within twenty minutes I was once again almost asleep. It was, of course, not merely the soporific topic but the accumulated impact of many grams of codeine on a system not much used to drugs. More than that, although I didn't admit it willingly, my body hadn't altogether recovered from the knocking-around it had gotten two days before.
The expression on the two men when they returned brought me awake with a chill. Harry was grim, and Robey's entire face had sagged; the corners of his mouth now pointed down instead of up. Neither man sat. Robey stared through the French doors with his eyes unfocused and let out a long, close-mouthed sigh.
'What?' Gadney asked nervously. 'What is it? What's wrong?'
Robey exhaled again and turned slowly to face us. 'Peter's dead.'
Chapter 6
'He's dead?' I asked, after a long silence.
Robey nodded. 'Uh, yes. Wednesday night.'
'Wednesday! But that's impossible! I had lunch with him Wednesday-at the Kranzler…' The odd, irrational way one's mind twists and skitters to reject what it doesn't want to know.
'It's true, Chris.' He began to say more, then shook his head back and forth. 'My God.'
The others at the table stared as if hypnotized while his slowly oscillating head rocked gradually to a stop.
'How well did you know him, Chris?' Harry asked abruptly.
'Not very. Better than most people did, but that isn't saying much.' Why had he asked me that? 'He was a good man,' I added, obscurely driven to defend him. 'I liked him.'
'I did too,' Robey said. Then, reflectively: 'I guess I didn't know him very well either. It looks like none of us did.'
An uneasy shiver trickled down my neck and settled icily between my shoulder blades. 'Mark-what the hell has happened?'
Robey looked down at the table and concentrated on stroking the cold pipe in the ashtray. 'That was Frankfurt MP headquarters on the phone. They said he-' His eyes came up and flickered apprehensively in Anne's direction. He shook his head again, this time roughly. 'Damn!'
